Reddit mentions of Are You a Stock or a Bond?: Identify Your Own Human Capital for a Secure Financial Future, Updated and Revised

> When times are good I earn upto 3Lacs a month. But the income is not very stable.

All planning must start with this first. Everything else is mostly irrelevant, including your choices to diversify earnings.

Your portfolio allocation should be such that your allocation to bonds should be higher than someone of equivalent age but in a job with a stable income stream.

Read this trade magazine article. Emphasizing one paragraph (page 2, portfolio diversification) from it:

> You should make sure your clients’ total (i.e., human and financial,
capital) portfolio is properly diversified. In simple words, when one type of capital zigs, the other should zag. In the early stages of the life cycle, financial capital and investment should be used to hedge and diversify human capital. Think of clients’ investable assets as a defence against adverse salaries and wages as opposed to an isolated pot of money that has
to be allocated.

> For example, if you took a look at my financial portfolio, you would see that my RRSP and discretionary savings are quite heavily invested in individual equities and mutual funds. And for good reason. As a tenured university professor, my human capital—and the subsequent pension I am entitled to—has the identical properties of a fixed income bond fund with monthly coupons. I am truly a walking inflation-adjusted real return bond. Therefore, I have very little need for fixed income bonds, money market funds and GICs in my financial portfolio. As a result, my total portfolio of human and financial capital is well-balanced, despite the fact that individually my financial capital and human capital are not.

> In contrast, my MBA students might earn a lot more than their university professor during their lifetime, but from year to-year
their relative income and bonus will fluctuate depending on the performance of the stock market, the industry they work in and the unpredictable vagaries of their labour market. Their human capital is almost entirely invested in equity, and so their financial capital should consist primarily of bonds and GICs early in their working career.

You are not a tenured univ professor, and quite different from one. The portfolio allocation should be on the other side. You are walking equity with lumpsum gains, with the added risk of crash landing (not being judgemental here, just highlighting the risks of your job).

And 5 years, is not a long run, and I see no goal at the end of 5 years that you seek to achieve. So start with planning your retirement corpus.

Pick a copy of this book if you are inclined to a DIY retirement plan. Or engage with a fee-only independent financial advisor.